1. Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South by Matthew Van Meter (Little, Brown)

As eloquent as Anthony Lewis’ Gideon’s Trumpet, on the 1963 landmark ruling establishing that criminal defendants have the right to an attorney even if they cannot afford one, and as poignant as Melissa Fay Greene’s Praying for Sheetrock, in which a uneducated black man took on the white sheriff who controlled the power structure in a remote Georgia county, Van Meter’s debut journeys to Plaquemines Parish, where a miscarriage of justice reveals the corrupt structure of white supremacy. Through the arrest of 19-year-old Gary Duncan for allegedly assaulting a white boy and his case, Duncan v. Louisiana, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that the constitutional right to a jury applied to state courts, Van Meter reveals the web of power and influence exerted by the local political boss which shaped this society’s inequality, from the establishment and public funding of private schools for white children to voter suppression. In his deeply humane chronicle, Van Meter works far beyond the legal record, through not only his keen understanding of this diverse cast of characters – including Duncan, who was trying to break up a fight, and the 29-year-old New York lawyer in Louisiana on a break from his corporate law firm – but also his feeling of Louisiana politics as a blood sport.

2. Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey (Ecco) 

In her powerful gut punch of a memoir, Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, reckons with the “willed amnesia buried deep in me like a root.” For years, her psychopathic stepfather tormented Trethewey and eventually killed her mother, but rather than focusing on this single trauma, or mounting a criminal case as would a lawyer, Trethewey brings her poetic sensibility to her quest to understand the tragic course of her mother’s life and how her own life had been shaped by that legacy. This discursive, artful memoir is a testimony to the bonds of Southern Black women, and Trethewey’s mother poses the profound question: “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”

3. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley (Scribner)

Translating the letters of a Buddhist priest’s “loudest, most passionate” daughter, Tsuneno, Stanley has created a vivid, polyphonic portrait of life in 19th-century Japan, deepened by her cultural understanding and nuanced recognition of the impact of dramas like an earthquake and samurai uprisings. In a delicate balance, Northwestern University historian Stanley also captures the quotidian details of Tsuneno’s everyday life through four tumultuous marriages and menial jobs in her rural province. Bristling for independence, Tsuneno breaks out of her village’s confines and is enticed by the glittery promise of Edo, the brimming capital city now known as Tokyo. Brave and resourceful but also unlucky, Tsuneno may have found freedom in Edo, but she trades it for a different form of repression, as she struggles with poverty and illness in this deeply striated society, which she relates in her letters home until her death in 1853. providing the foundation for Stanley to evoke the Shogun era with panache and insight.

4. Carville’s Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice by Pam Fessler (Liveright)

As Fessler writes in her vivid history, “Carville”was shorthand for the Louisiana Leper Home established as a quarantine facility on an idle, ramshackle sugar plantation. NPR correspondent Fessler vivifies the world inside the leprosarium, such as New Orleans debutante Betty Parker and her fellow patient and lover who escaped the facility (which was eventually closed as medical breakthroughs halted spread of the contagious disease), as well as the Daughters of Charity sisters who fought for the rights of patients who were often treated as prisoners.  Adding a poignant spark to Fessler’s chronicle is the stigma of the disease and the deeply held family secret that her husband’s grandfather vanished, dispatched to Carville after he was diagnosed with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease.

 5. Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle (Algonquin) 

In this wise and wry novel, McCorkle focuses on an octogenarian couple haunted by the untimely deaths of their parents: Frank’s father died in in a North Carolina train wreck, and Lil’s mother perished in a Boston nightclub fire. McCorkle writes in ingeniously structured vignettes that come together, gathering velocity and drawing in characters, including a single mother and her child now residing in Frank’s childhood home near the accident. In this constellation of relationships, McCorkle reveals fractured memories and revelations in a novel distinguished by its warmth, empathy, and humor.